The Avocado Sock Claims to Perfectly Ripen Your Fruit

We’ll admit that it’s one of the most unfortunate food situations: You purchase an avocado in the hopes of making creamy, delicious avo toast...only to find that it’s still unripe as ever come the next morning. Or, alternatively, it's become an oblong blob of mush. There's just no winning.

But is the solution really to dress up the fruit up in a tiny outfit? An outfit that costs—gasp—$14.99 CAD ($11.55 USD)?

Yes, says Diane Sherwood, Vancouver resident and mastermind behind “The Avocado Sock.” It’s not quite an outfit. It’s a single sock, after all. But it clothes the entire avocado, encasing it in 100 percent wool fibers that supposedly expedite the ripening process to just 24 hours.

“The Avocado Sock is an all-natural, effective way to ensure you have a perfectly ripe avocado every single time,” reads the description of the product on its website. “Simply insert an un-ripened avocado into the sock, and in as little as 24 hours, it will be ready to enjoy.

No, it doesn’t just ripen because it finally feels confident in its new clothes. The company credits the sock’s “natural lanolin and warmth” as the catalyst for the faster ripening—and frankly, while we’re not into the idea of clothing all our fruits and veggies, we'd be curious to try it. After all, there’s an age-old paper bag trick for ripening avocados that works in much the same way: If you enclose them in a paper bag, the ethylene gas they release (which speeds up the ripening process naturally) is trapped, and the ripening process is triggered more quickly.

But The Avocado Sock swears the sock method is “faster than a paper bag” because it’s able to ripen the avocado “evenly and gently.”

According to North Shore News, Sherwood, who previously owned a catering business, had always placed unripe avocados into ski socks, and was surprised to hear that her friends didn’t do the same.